A Catholic's Broken Heart

Today is Valentine’s Day, a day set aside in America to celebrate “love,” though in today’s culture love has meanings perhaps never conceived by the original St. Valentine’s Day celebrants. Be that as it may, this particular Valentine’s Day is a sad affair for those in the Catholic community who are in crisis, increasingly unable to differentiate between the Planned Parenthood version of love and the Catholic Health Association’s version of fidelity.

What has fidelity got to do with love or with Valentine’s Day? The answer is as clear as the nose on your face. Love, in the true sense, has to do with the total self-giving of one for another, particularly within the context of marriage. Such a love grows, expands and is all-consuming through the trust that one spouse has for the other as each commits to being faithful to each other. This is fidelity.

Fidelity has many synonyms including loyalty, faithfulness, reliability, trustworthiness and devotion. Each of these admirable characteristics embodies the historic meaning of love. This is in direct opposition to the Planned Parenthood version, which encompasses a perspective on sexual relations that is totally devoid of virtue. Planned Parenthood’s version permits sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, protection of criminal rapists, birth control methods that lead to sexually transmitted diseases and, in far too many cases, abortion—all conditions which, when suffered by a Planned Parenthood client, result in more income for this purveyor of smut, disloyalty and infidelity. In Planned Parenthood’s world, genuine love would be the one thing that would destroy its business.

Catholic health care, on the other hand, as defined by the Catholic Health Association’s (CHA) president, Sister Carol Keehan, is in the same category. Like Planned Parenthood, CHA is having a “love” crisis. The love of which we speak in this case is love of Christ, fidelity to Him and to His word, loyalty to Catholic teaching and devotion to the principles that embody Catholic medical ethics. Catholic health care should not be political, pragmatic or prepared to have a hand extended, waiting to be filled with federal tax dollars. Government subsidies are the antithesis of Catholic doctrine. This where CHA’s problem begins.

Further, CHA and its board members, like Jarrett Anderson, should not be beholden to the Obamacare definition of health care. Nor should they be dabbling in the arena of contraception, abortion and reproductive health technologies—each of which not only contradicts love but betrays a genuine disdain for Catholic truth.

When it comes to involvement with the culture of death, one cannot actually distinguish between Planned Parenthood and the Catholic Health Association’s philosophy. That is the rub.

There was a time when Catholic health care existed for the poor, to serve the poor, to affirm their humanity and to accomplish all these things with the support of Catholics, not the government. In those days, genuine love of Christ and imitation of His love for the poor was the cornerstone of Catholic medical services. Not so today.

It is time for the Catholic bishops of the United States to step forward, in a united voice, and end this debacle. The Catholic Church and her service to those in need should not be tied in any way to diabolical reproductive health services the likes of which are practiced by Planned Parenthood and its cronies. We need genuine Catholic health care which should be the antidote to Planned Parenthood’s exploitation of the human person.

This is why, as long as the bishops are silent, this Catholic heart will remain broken.